Psychometric Validation of the Brief Alcohol Social Density Assessment in an Adult Community Sample
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Individuals’ social networks exert a strong influence on alcohol use, but valid assessment of network drinking behavior is typically lengthy and high in participant burden. The aim of this study was to validate the Brief Alcohol Social Density Assessment (BASDA), an efficient measure of perceived alcohol use within a person’s social network, in a sample of adult drinkers from the general community. Specifically, the convergent, criterion‐related, incremental validity and internal validity were investigated by examining the BASDA in relation to other established measures of drinking motives, weekly drinking level, and severity of involvement. Methods Participants were 903 (56% female) adults who reported drinking in the last year and who completed the BASDA, the Drinking Motives Questionnaire, the Daily Drinking Questionnaire, and the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). Results Significant positive correlations were found between the BASDA and drinking motives, drinking quantity, and the AUDIT ( r s = 0.21 to 0.51, p s < 0.001), providing support for convergent validity. There was a significantly higher BASDA score for those scoring at or above an AUDIT cutoff for hazardous drinking ( p < 0.001), providing support for criterion‐related validity. Finally, beyond motives and covariates, the BASDA was significantly associated with total AUDIT score (Δ R 2 = 0.09, p < 0.001), indicating its additive contribution and providing support for incremental validity. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed excellent fit, and all items significantly loaded onto a single factor ( p < 0.0001), providing evidence of internal validity. The resulting alcohol social density latent variable was significantly and robustly associated with drinks per week and AUDIT total score. Conclusions These findings provide further support for the BASDA as a valid and efficient measure of social network alcohol density for understanding social influences on alcohol misuse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".